Everyone is hosting virtual events as a result of the pandemic. Every day, hundreds, if not thousands, of exciting virtual events take place online.
Because of the heightened competition in the virtual event arena, you'll need a standout online event marketing plan to enhance conversions, generate interest, and boost attendance for your next virtual event.
Developing and implementing a strategy may be more difficult than what your competitors are doing. That's why we've put up this guide, which includes six tips for making your virtual event a success in 2022.
Try these tactics the next time you're planning a virtual event to make it the most successful yet.
How Do You Promote Your Virtual Event?
Promoting a virtual event isn't all that different from regular event promotion. The main distinction is that promoting a virtual event usually takes less time. You can investigate and choose the perfect event platform in a couple of hours rather than spending weeks looking for and reserving the right venue.
Because virtual event platforms allow you to create an event at any time for anyone, you may find yourself with less time to market your event, making it even more critical to have a robust promotion strategy in place.
Email marketing, social media marketing, paid ad campaigns, cross-promotion, and other methods of promotion could be used to promote your event. Let's look at how these tools can help you with your overall strategy.
6 Strategies to Try to Promote Your Virtual Event
Here are six different ways that you can promote your virtual event and succeed in doing so.
1. Consider Your Event Timeline and Promote Before, During, and After the Event
Unlike traditional events, which begin planning 6 to 12 months in advance, virtual events can be completed in as little as 1 to 3 months.
Setting up a virtual event gives you more time to focus on promoting your event because you don't have to secure a physical venue ahead of time.
A general timeline for publicizing your event is as follows:
Before:
● Identify your audience
● Create registration pages
● Send direct mail campaigns
● Create social media posts and contests
● Create event website
● Launch email marketing
● Send reminder emails
During:
● Continue the reminder emails
● Create live social media posts
● Share downloadable content
● Use live chat or chatbots to answer event questions
● Run branded experiences and activities
After:
● Send follow-up thank you emails
● Send “sorry we missed you” emails for no shows
● Update website to be relevant post event
● Share post-event surveys
● Launch retargeting campaigns
● Post highlights on websites and social media
● Send invitations to your next event
● Have sales contact your leads and begin nurturing them
2. Get Buy-In from Your Sales Team to Help Market and Drive Registrations
When your sales and marketing departments work together, you may increase the chances of your event's conversion, promotion, registration, and sales cycle success.
Both divisions have complementary abilities and knowledge of your target demographic, which can help you convert more customers.
For example, marketers may have a general understanding of who their target demographic is, and they may have even created a buyer persona. The salespeople, on the other hand, have firsthand experience interacting with buyers and can advise marketers on major pain areas, frustrations, and frequently asked questions, allowing marketers to generate effective content that will resonate with their true and evolving audience.
Listen to your sales staff to obtain a better understanding of your target market so you can develop more effective registration pages that will increase conversions.
3. Make Email Marketing Your Best Friend
For virtual event marketing, email marketing is the most effective technique. You can't register for the event unless you have an email address.
When it comes to sending out pre-event emails, be as generous as possible. Don't just send one reminder and assume it'll suffice; emails are easy to overlook.
Before your event, it's a good idea to send at least three reminder emails (and four is probably better).
Pre-Event Reminder Email Timeline:
Reminder a week before the event
Reminder a day before the event
Reminder the day of the event
Reminder at the start of the event
Reminder to people who register and haven’t signed in yet
Following your event, email marketing becomes the most effective lead nurturing tool. You don't want your attendees to leave after the event; instead, you want to engage them, keep them around, and funnel them into your sales funnel.
After Event Email Engagement Ideas:
● Follow-up thank you email
● Post-event survey
● Send invites for future events or webinars
● Ask for reviews to post on future registration pages and online content
● Email leads to ongoing blogs and product updates to keep them up to date and engaged with your brand.
To close a transaction, it often requires several points of contact with a potential lead. The longer you can keep a lead engaged with your organization and content, the more likely you are to close a deal and remain a customer. If you go above and above for a consumer, they will tell their friends and family about your business or product, which is perfect.
4. Create an Event Page that Converts
Your event page is the single most critical source of information for your attendees in order to attend your event. It should astonish your audience and make event registration as simple as feasible. They have an issue, and your product can solve it, as explained at your virtual event. Make sure you demonstrate this in the most direct and imaginative manner possible.
Pictures, your event date, a well-written blurb and description of your event, videos (from prior events or behind-the-scenes if available), information on guest speakers, and social proof must all be included on the event page (customer reviews). Don't forget to create shareable buttons to put on social media to help spread the news as well.
Above all, your registration page should make registering as easy as possible. Make the "Register Now" button visible, not hidden, and consider including multiple registration buttons, one at the top and one at the bottom of the page.
A/B tests different event registration sites to find which is more effective: a green, red, or blue registration button. It may seem insignificant, but even changes in color or phrase in your call-to-action can make a significant difference. If you have the time, run an A/B test on your signup page. There's always an opportunity for improvement.
Some virtual event systems have a registration page builder with fully customizable branding and automatic email notification settings. Upload your company's logo, choose your brand colors, and set up automatic email notifications so that your attendees receive an email after they register for your event.
5. Use Social Media Channels to Your Advantage
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and even Snapchat all have advantages and uses for promoting your event.
LinkedIn is wonderful for drawing a professional crowd and making it simple to find people who meet your target demographic. LinkedIn Ads enable hyper-targeted ad targeting (for example, show your event ad to human resource professionals in a 50-mile radius around Chicago).
Facebook is widely used and is useful for developing highly shareable event pages that allow for multi-media posts such as images, videos, links, and textual messages.
Snapchat and Instagram provide another avenue to contact your target audience with photographs and short videos for the younger, more visually focused demographic.
Also, don't forget about YouTube. Do you have video from a past virtual event? To reach people who are actively consuming comparable material, use Google Ad Manager to post your video ad before or during similar content on YouTube.
6. Tease What is Coming to Your Next Virtual Event
Don't give away all of your secrets right away. Keep your audience wondering and wanting to return to your website or event page for more information.
This is a popular strategy used at music festivals. They start with the minor artists, but as the festival gets closer, they start unveiling the headline acts, the key attractions that fans have been anticipating.
Give your viewers cliffhangers to keep them guessing. Don't list all of your guest speakers on your registration page. For example, you could say "additional guest speakers will be announced next week." This also means that you can begin marketing your event before all of the details are finished.
Tease out these hints and updates using social media posts, pre-event emails, and updating your event website and registration page, and encourage people to return to see what's new.
Ensure that Your Virtual Event Succeeds
As you can see, there are many ways that you can set up your virtual event for success today. From using social media to your advantage to email marketing, you can follow this quick and easy-to-understand guide to ensure that your event succeeds today.
How Can Kwivrr Help Promote Your Virtual Event?
Kwivrr is an event management platform with intuitive navigation to allow you and your guests to promote your events. A click of a button and you’ve shared your event to Instagram. A couple key strokes and you’ve infused your message into all of the outgoing emails to your guests and followers. Download Kwivrr today!